Various kinds of optical discs have been proposed as a recordable disc medium which is removable from a recording/reproducing apparatus. Such recordable optical discs are proposed as media having large capacity of several gigabytes and are highly expected as media for recording a AV (Audio Visual) signal such as a video signal.
One of the encoding methods for performing digital compression on a digital video signal is an MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) 2 scheme. This MPEG2 is applied to record a digital video signal on a recording medium. For example, in the case of recording an analog video signal on a recording medium, the video signal is encoded by the MPEG2 scheme and then an encoded bit stream is recorded on the recording medium. Further, in recent digital TV broadcasting, a video program is encoded by the MPEG2 scheme and then transmitted in the form of a transport stream. In the case of recording digital broadcasting on the recording medium, a method of recording a transport stream in the form of a digital signal, without performing decoding and re-encoding, is used.
A disc medium is superior in performing random-access processing. In the case of recording a digital video signal on a disc recording medium with this property, even free areas are dispersed on the disc medium, recording can start from one free area and then, can continued by searching the disc medium for free areas.
The number of contents to be recorded increases with an increase in the capacity of an optical disc. Each content is recorded together with its title onto the optical disc. Then, the titles are read and displayed when the optical disc is put into a reproducing apparatus. A user can select a desired title to reproduce the contents of the title.
Conventionally, the titles of contents are recorded in arbitrary different areas on the optical disc. Therefore, such problem arises that it takes time to read and display the titles.